Apollo teaches us distance, while Dionysos teaches us proximity, contact, intimacy with ourselves, nature, and others. I knew a sociology professor, a typically Apollonian type who could no longer step out of his critical attitude toward social phenomena. He complained of always being at a distance, of having lost the knack of coming together with anything. He could analyze but never participate, and he feared he would end up becoming bitter. He stopped enjoying brilliant analyses of social events (lived by others); he had enough of his own biting irony. His drinking was sad, his sex life boring. He wanted spontaneity, participation, being part of something, but couldn’t allow himself to dissolve into a group emotion. He knew all too well that the loss of critical function leads to the alienation of freedoms based on the ability to discriminate. But this knowledge kept him from enjoying the gifts of Dionysos that he secretly yearned for.
One summer day, after many weeks of supplication from his ten-year-old daughter, he took her to one of those giant water-slides. Of course, he had brought books and magazines to read while she played, and of course he thought water-slides a stupid, vulgar, promiscuous activity. He couldn’t read: too much noise and too much insistence from his daughter that he should come with her, sit on a large rubber tube, and slide with it down the water-slide. He did. And, just there and then, he met Dionysos. The sliding, the acceleration and the final splash m the water pool— all this was felt as a sudden coming into his body. He was enraptured. For the first time in years he began to play, really play in the water, hear the joyous shouting of children and adults, feel the sun on his wet body. He didn’t mind the proximity of so many half-naked bodies swimming around; he had images of wild horses splashing in a water pool and even liked the feeling of being one animal among others. His social persona was gone, and the suspension of critical functioning let him at last have a feeling of Dionysian participation.
Certainly, the sociology professor is right to be cautious: if the disappearance of critical functioning proves to be a permanent and collective choice, emotion is transferred to the emotions and values of a leader, and the sect phenomenon results. A sect has an intense group emotion around which the collective identity is built. There will then inevitably ensue an alienating polarization between, on the one hand, the irrational sect members and, on the other hand, those rationalists who become ever colder and more distant as the excitement grows. For both the Dionysian spirit is lost. The first group is convinced it’s more “alive” than the other, while having renounced an important part of its freedom, whereas the second group rejects all Dionysian experience for fear of compromising its freedom of judgment and critical faculty.
The rather jolly figure of the Roman Bacchus to which we’re accustomed, along with the Rousseauian aspect of humanistic psychology, has made us forget that the expression of “primitive” and “natural” passions is not an innocent process, no more than childhood is innocent. The desire to free oneself from the dictatorship of reason has more than once given birth to the most demoralizing sects and to an anti-intellectualism as alienating as the rationalistic denial of Dionysos. But the solution is not to be found by ignoring Dionysos; a polytheistic psychology allows one to respect Dionysos and Apollo.